As the fall semester gets into swing, the lab is having a lot of fun and making progress on research. Several milestones should not go unnoticed, and there are photos to boot. In no particular order:

A big WELCOME to the lab for PhD student Courtney Reed! Courtney joined us this summer, having recently completed a Masters at Harvard in Hopi Hoekstra's lab.

CONGRATULATIONS to PhD candidate Bianca Brown, who passed her qualifying exams and advanced to candidacy last week!

We had a wildly fun and successful field team representing our lab and others from Brown University in Kenya this summer, including Loren Albert (Voss postdoc fellow, Kellner lab), Patrick Freeman, Courtney Reed, Jesse Tarnas (Mustard lab), and Molly Magid (Voss undergrad fellow).

Ashley Bang's summer research was featured on the NOAA website for Estuary Week in September.

Brian Gill spent a month interfacing with Conservancy managers to address conservation challenges in Kenya, where he lost count of rhino sightings and yet still managed to submit an excellent manuscript for publication while on the road.

An extensive review by Goheen et al. was just released as a contribution to ​The Year in Ecology and Conservation Biology series. The paper details major conservation lessons learned through large-scale and long-term experiments involving large-mammal communities in Kenya -- an important set of lessons for ecologists and conservation biologists provided by an inspirational team of researchers and collaborators.

Congratulations to Bianca for her winning proposal to conduct exploratory research on the microbiome of the small mammals in Kenya. The competitive award, from the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society (IBES), is offered to graduate students to pursue research, training, and travel abroad. Bianca will use the award to study how the microbiomes of a diverse guild of small mammal species differ in the presence or absence of large mammalian herbivores, and across a climatic gradient, at Mpala Research Centre.

Molly's research is at the nexus of cutting-edge molecular ecology and good old-fashioned fieldwork in conservation biology: using fly-derived DNA to help characterize vertebrate communities in diverse habitats. Basically, the flies find evidence of what vertebrates occur in local environments -- by sucking blood, eating carrion, ovipositing on feces, etc. -- and then provide us the genetic evidence. This evidence will enable our conservation partners to account for rare and cryptic animals in their activities.

Tyler Kartzinel is an Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology & Environment and Society. Brown students will learn about new courses being offered, including Conservation Biology in the Genomics Age, and unique research opportunities focusing on conservation biology in the Kartzinel Lab.

Tyler was elected to the Ecological Society of America's 2018-2022 cohort of Early Career Fellows. The Society Announced the honor to recognize members who have advanced ecological knowledge and applications and show promise to make outstanding contributions to a wide range of fields served by ESA.

Tyler Kartzinel: Elected for outstanding contributions at the interface of ecology and molecular biology, and for his pioneering use of DNA metabarcoding to elucidate the structure of complex terrestrial food webs.

It is a tremendous honor to join such an inspiring group of scholars. Thanks to ESA for the leadership and inspiration that it provides to the diversity and generations of ecologists.

Several members of the lab are just back from an extremely productive field trip. Highlights include a DNA barcoding workshop at the National Museums of Kenya (led by Kartzinel and Gill, and Director Musili from the East African Herbarium), many pre-dawn captures of small mammals (led by Brown and collaborators from the Goheen lab), and many trees and and megaherbivores counted (led by Gill and Lokeny). Now the team is breaking in the new lab -- copious amounts of data to report soon! Photos of the highlights are below.

Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) just released a “BioInteractive” lab featuring our research on the diets of savanna herbivores.

Educators and students in high school and college biology courses will go on an expedition to Mpala Research Centre in Kenya, where they can investigate niche partitioning as a mechanism that enables similar species to coexist.

One of the most exciting aspects of this paper is the idea of "rewilding laboratory mice" to begin understanding the ecology of this model organism in genetics and medicine. What happens when lab mice are infected with an intestinal parasite, put outside, and tasked with surviving in a world with limited resources?

Add on top of that all of the exciting technology brought together to probe this creative experiment for mechanism -- PIT tags, DNA metabarcoding, NMR spectroscopy -- and you've got the makings of a classic. In this experiment, custom-built feeding devices capable of tracking foraging behavior, paired with DNA metabarcoding, revealed compensatory feeding behaviors by mice that otherwise might have masked the effects of infection.

Especially relevant to research in our lab, a hormone called leptin that serves as an indicator of hunger and body fat was correlated with consumption of different species of wild plants. Animals with higher leptin concentrations tended to eat more protein-rich clovers and other legumes than did animals with lower leptin, potentially pointing to different foraging behaviors and differential selectivity for wild foods as mechanisms for dealing with infection while reestablishing a dietary niche after generations in the laboratory. Although the effect sizes for the DNA metabarcoding data were small, these tantalizing trends highlight the importance of these measurements and the value of the technique. A valuable contribution.

As we kick off the new academic year, we extend the warmest welcome to Dr. Brian Gill, inaugural IBES postdoc in the lab. Brian's doctoral research fused a cutting-edge molecular tool kit with some extremely rugged field research to test important ideas in ecology and evolution. For example, Brian used DNA barcoding to identify a huge diversity of mayflies from tropical and temperate streams, revealing that their elevational ranges are narrower in the tropics, where species may be more sensitive to the effects of climate change -- a result that may not have been so clearcut in the absence of molecular data, due to the prevalence of cryptic species. We all look forward to benefiting from Brian's leadership and skills as we study how species are respond to environmental changes in New England, in East Africa, and around the world.